F9 beta: disk druid

Gerry Reno greno at verizon.net
Sun Apr 20 17:37:51 UTC 2008


Some observations from my first attempt at loading F9beta:

  I loaded up a copy of F9beta and went through setting up some raid 
arrays and LVM.  When it went to copy the install image to the hard 
drive, the machine reset and so I went back through the install again.  
At the disk druid screens I selected Custom because I had already set up 
all the partitioning, raid and LVM.  But the screen showed all the raid 
arrays as 'foreign'.  So I had to delete all the LVM (which was on top 
of the raid) and then delete all the raid arrays and redeclare 
everything again.  This should not have been necessary.

  Something which was very annoying was the fact that I was building 
some RAID-1 arrays for /boot, swap, and /.  I wanted 2 drives and a 
spare drive.  The partitions on the first two drives went fine,  sda1 
and sdb1 were 196M,  sda2 and sdb2 were 4G,  sda3 and sdb3 were 100G.  
When I went to partition the third drive,  sdc1 was 196M,  sdc2 was 4G, 
but when I declared the next partition of 100G I expected disk druid to 
make it sdc3.  Instead it makes it sdc2 100G and renames sdb2 to sdb3 
4G.  I wish it would not try to outsmart the user.  I know what I want 
the partitions to look like.  Just do it.  If disk druid is trying to 
optimize things then there should be a checkbox that says something like 
'do not optimize'.  I struggled for an hour with this and finally gave 
up trying to setup the partitions in a sane manner.

  I also noticed that when I re-enter the install that all the drives 
get new lettering.  eg:  /dev/sdg the first time through became /dev/sda 
the next time, and then /dev/sdc the third time.  The system I loaded 
the beta on has three SATA controllers and it seems like it is randomly 
picking the controllers and assigning the devices.  This is rather 
confusing.

Gerry




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